Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
Reading their letters to each other, and chatting about prefigurative politics as the practice of relentlessly building worlds through unspeakable violence and loss; of building worlds and living in them anyway.
Part old-fashioned Renaissance man, part hardcore avant-gardist, the Canadian painter-photographer-filmmaker-musician gives full vent to his genius in the exhilarating perceptual vaudeville, named after the ‘central region’ of tissue that acts as a conduit between the brain’s two hemispheres.
A landmark film on black life – a poetic filmic constellation of meditations, fragments and interviews on what it means to be black in America in the 21st century, from one of its great cinematographers.
A Festival supporting the struggle for Sex Workers’ Rights: share knowledge, discuss, dance and strategise!
Repetitive, mesmerizing rhythmic workouts, to pieces of stark and rigorous introspection, where notes picked and slid in isolation, scatter like mercury around the listener.
Using violin and cello the duo map out a twilight sonic world that seems to tread the faultlines between improvisation and composition.
Sound and image slipping out of synch and into discord, the programme includes (in London at least) a very special version of Hollis Frampton’s masterful (nostalgia) with a live narration by Michael Snow.
AVVA sees the internal feedback of Toshi’s no-input mixing desk is fed to Billy, and transformed into bright and variegated patters, striations and blooming colour, before being fed back to Toshi and manipulated on route to the PA.
Beat poet Ira Cohen’s now infamous and wildly psychedelic film odyssey feeds one’s own seeing apparatus through beautifully warped and distorting mylar mirrors, resulting in a film dense and rich with visual arcana and poetry.
“The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in Moby Dick…he painted a picture of the world in which we live, which is to this day unsurpassed.” – C. L. R. James
Sonic ‘observations’ of the world, through micro recordings on a tiny scale and transformed into something musically compelling.
